Pick up the cedar-style sign from the table and set a calculator beside it. That small act changes everything. The piece is still the same piece — same grain, same careful shading, same hours pressed into the wood. But now it has to become a number, and that is where most makers quietly fall apart. Not because they cannot do math. Because they are afraid the number will be too high and someone will walk away. So they guess low. They look at what someone else is charging on Etsy, cut it a little, and call it done. And what they have actually done is price from fear instead of facts. The sign sells. They feel good for about ten minutes. Then they realize they forgot to count the two and a half hours they spent burning it. They forgot the sandpaper, the finish, the packaging, the gas to drive to the market. They forgot that their time is the most expensive thing on that table. Underpricing almost always comes from the same mistake: counting the wood and forgetting everything else. So here is a formula that actually works. Your selling price equals your materials, plus your labor, plus your overhead, plus a profit margin. That is it. Four parts. And every single one of them matters. Materials are the easy part — the wood blank, the finish, the sandpaper. But labor is where most people stop short. You have to count your hours. Not just the burning hours. The sanding before. The finishing after. The time you spent communicating with the buyer, packaging the piece, driving to the post office. All of it is labor. All of it belongs in the price. Overhead is the category people forget entirely. Think of it as the cost of running the business that makes the art possible. Your burning tips wear down. Your tool needs replacing eventually. You pay booth fees, platform fees, the cost of business cards, the shipping supplies sitting in your closet. None of those things are free, and none of them should come out of your profit. Then there is the profit margin — the part that actually lets this be a business and not just an expensive hobby. A common range for handmade work is to price at two to three times your total costs. That sounds like a lot until you realize how thin the margin gets once fees and time are honestly counted. For example, suppose Angela's cedar-style family sign uses about eight dollars in materials — wood, finish, sandpaper. She spends two and a half hours burning, sanding, and finishing it. If she values her labor at twenty dollars an hour, that is fifty dollars in time alone. Add a modest overhead portion — say, seven dollars to cover tool wear, packaging, and a share of booth fees — and her total cost before profit is already sixty-five dollars. A two-times markup puts her at one hundred thirty dollars. A more conservative price of eighty or ninety dollars is still not covering her time at a fair rate. That math is not meant to scare you. It is meant to show you what is actually happening when you price a piece at thirty-five dollars because it felt like a round number that nobody would argue with. The goal here is not to squeeze anyone. It is to stop subsidizing every buyer with your unpaid labor. Because that is what underpricing is — it is a quiet subsidy. You are working for free and calling it a sale. Now, not every piece needs to carry the same weight. A useful way to think about your inventory is in three tiers. Small ready-made pieces — ornaments, coasters, simple signs with no personalization — can be priced lower because they take less time and require no back-and-forth with a buyer. These are your entry-point pieces, the ones that let someone try your work without a big commitment. A midrange tier covers personalized signs like the cedar family piece — pieces that require customization, communication, and more burning time. And then there are higher-touch custom commissions: detailed pet portraits, wedding pieces, memorial work. Those carry the highest emotional specificity and the most risk, and they should be priced to reflect that. Three tiers. Three different conversations with three different buyers. And each one priced from the formula, not from a guess. Here is where Angela's budgeting instincts actually become an asset. She already knows how to look at a number and ask whether it is honest. She already knows the difference between what something costs and what it feels like it costs. That same discipline belongs in her pricing. The question is not what will people pay. The question is what does this piece actually cost to make, and what hourly rate would make this sustainable for the next six months? Sit with that for a moment. What hourly rate would make you feel like this is worth continuing? Not the minimum wage floor — that is a legal baseline, not a creative business target. Something that respects the skill, the practice, the reinvention this work represents. And then ask yourself which pieces on your table are practice pieces, which are gift pieces you made for someone you love, and which are actual inventory — pieces you made with the intention of selling. Those categories are not the same, and they should not all carry the same pricing logic. One more question worth sitting with: where do you feel guilt when someone asks the price? That guilt is information. It usually points to a story you are telling yourself about whether your work is good enough, or whether you have earned the right to charge real money yet. You have been burning wood carefully, patiently, with intention. That is a skill. Skills have value. The blank tag beside the cedar sign is not waiting for you to be humble. It is waiting for you to be honest. Once that number is written down — once the tag is no longer blank — the next fragile moment arrives. Because a buyer standing at your market table can reach out and feel the grain under their fingers. A buyer online cannot. And that means the photograph has to do what your hands cannot.